5 Ways to Ensure a Memorable Shopping Experience this Holiday Season

The months of November and December are probably the most important times of the year for online retailers. The online sales peaks during the holiday season, and so does the website traffic. Quite often we hear reports of online stores going offline or slowing down as they are unable to handle the increase in traffic. In the short term, this leads to lost sales. In the longer run, this can lead to serious repercussions.

In order to ensure a fast and reliable online shopping experience to your customers, here are some quick tips to ensure your shopping cart does not ‘grind to a halt’ under peak traffic conditions and keep those online orders flowing:

• Improve Scalability:
  Ensure your web servers can handle the peak load. Provision additional servers or virtualize, if necessary.

• Improve Application Performance:
  Use optimization best practices such as caching, data compression, load balancing, image optimization, limiting database queries, etc.

• Offer a Secure Shopping Experience:
  Implement the necessary security best practices. Handle your customer's personal data with utmost care.

• Ensure High Uptime of your Service:
  Monitor the uptime and performance of your online shopping cart with Site24x7's web application monitor. Detect transaction errors and fix them before users are affected.

• Value your Customer's Time:
  Make sure customers can quickly find what they need. Use our web application monitor to find out slow transactions and take steps to speed them up.

Got any other tips? Do share your thoughts and impressions in our comments section.